


A Path Clear and Bright

by Aurumite



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates
Genre: Adoption, Alternate Universe - No Deeprealms, Father-Daughter Relationship, Found Family, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-07
Updated: 2016-12-16
Packaged: 2018-07-29 20:16:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7698022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aurumite/pseuds/Aurumite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After a merciless battle, Niles finds an infant abandoned in the rubble. </p><p>He knows it would be best to kill her, to spare her from the life ahead. But he was salvaged once before, and maybe it's time to pay his way forward.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> If you follow me on Tumblr you know I have some Issues with the Deeprealms and all their implications (though I do love the 2nd gen). Usually I just headcanon that the kids were born after the war or perhaps adopted during, and before I knew it I had all these ideas about Niles floundering with a newborn on the march, desperately trying to give her a better life than he had.
> 
> I ultimately didn't put a gore warning on this fic, but I'll warn for it here just in case, since it's all from Niles's PoV and he's...pretty gross sometimes. 
> 
> The title comes from Niles's A support with Nina: "Rather than the dark road I was set down... I want your path to be clear and bright. That's all any parent wants for their child."

Above the crackling of the fires, the shrieking of the wyverns overhead, even over Lord Leo's cold command to march, Niles heard it.

It was high and shivery, but it came with surprising force. An insistent, wailing bladder instrument. A mighty bellows. Despite Leo spurring on his horse and Odin following, soot in his yellow hair, Niles turned to seek out the sound.

He wasn't sure what drove him through the cramped alleyways. Morbid curiosity, perhaps. An old, old anxiousness stroked between his ribs as he skirted the debris: mud brick and clay tiles blown off buildings by dark spells, fallen beams, trash fires, bodies and bodies and bodies. He spotted one of his own arrows sprouting from the back of one. It left a messy brown stain on the corpse's white robes—some priest of the Dawn Dragon, as if such bullshit existed. Niles raised his eyebrows and scraped a foot behind himself as he bent to pluck it out, an impertinent bow of thanks. With it back in his quiver, he strode on.

The town had fallen quickly. They weren't far from Hoshido now, and after Cheve, not many were willing to resist the knights of Nohr.

Not that Nohr cared. Garon was just one man, and he couldn't hold an entire country in his fist, no matter how calloused. He needed their blood, their fear. And so Nohr stormed through, and anything that wasn't Nohr's was put to the torch: dark or red hair, creased eyelids, and the roofs over their heads. Only fair, Niles supposed as he followed the thin keening. A strong army sent its message ahead. There was only so much Lord Leo and his siblings could do to lessen its length.

He reached a stone courtyard with a stone church, largely untouched by the fires devouring the buildings around it, which gasped up toward the smoky sky as if to breathe between mouthfuls. Sparks blew across the space with the hot wind like falling stars, and ash swirled into the cracks between the stones.

On the church's steps was a little wooden basket covered with a stained sheet, afloat in the chaos, very flammable, and Niles' chest crunched tight as he walked up the black-scored steps toward it. The crying was almost unbearable in his ears, this close. Amazing how it made itself heard from so far away. Amazing that he had the balls to go to it.

_Why._

He crouched and peeled back the dirty cloth to reveal an even dirtier baby, naked, thinner than he assumed most babies should be. She screamed in his face and he bared his teeth to keep from screaming back.

“What do we have here,” he said instead, jaw taut. “Another fucking orphan. Incredible. Did they think the clergy cared enough to take you in?”

“Niles!”

Odin's voice, but it was far away yet. As usual, Niles ignored it. As the hot wind met her skin, the infant's squalling turned into real tears that left clean tracks down her face.

“Now, now,” Niles said as he thumbed them away. “These won't get you anywhere. Pity doesn't exist. If you survive, that'll be your life's first lesson. You should thank me for it.”

“ _Niles!_ ”

He glanced over his shoulder, but Odin hadn't reached him yet. The babe's crying lessened to whimpers when he touched her face, and her eyes finally opened to look at him. Niles held his breath while he stared back. Her lips quivered. He felt his own stretch into a smirk.

“Your parents didn't _want_ you,” he told her. “That's why you're here. But don't worry—they're burned to bone by now, and maybe they were chopped into little pieces, first, or trampled into mush by a horse. Either way, they got what they deserved.” And oh, it throbbed through him, that savage retribution. “Isn't that delicious?”

The babe kept on making her awful noises. She had dark skin, he realized then, dark like his. Her thin, tangled swirl of hair was pale. She reached for him with her pathetic little chicken arms, fists clenching and unclenching, and he saw her fingers were absurdly long. He examined his own hands, his own long fingers, perfect for pulling bowstrings, fletching arrows, slight-of-hand, lockpicking, reaching down bootcuffs for a dagger; perfect for making women arch and men beg and everyone cry his poor excuse for a name; perfect for wrapping around necks, threading hot needles, poking into wounds when Lord Leo needed information.

Such hands. They should have been chopped off long ago, followed by his head. But before he knew it they were reaching back, and he pulled the infant into his arms and stood with her to survey the courtyard. Her skin was hot even through his shirt. She weighed less than his quiver by half.

She stopped crying, then. Her hands fisted in his mantle.

“Niles!”

That voice wasn't Odin's. Niles snapped to attention immediately, boots clicking together, and from the dark alley came Lord Leo himself, on foot, Odin at his heels. They both stopped in the courtyard and stared at him like he'd lost his mind—like he had any left to lose. The thought made him laugh.

“I fail to see what is so funny,” said Leo. “I ordered you to move out. These fires aren't putting themselves out anytime soon. We need to march a good distance before we can make camp for the night.”

“Niles,” Odin said, a little hushed. “Just what, in the name of all that is eldritch, are you doing?”

Niles realized how he must have looked to them, clutching and being clutched, his spindly hands sheltering the baby girl, almost too big over her bony shoulders and bare bottom.

“I suppose you underestimated what I'd do to find a little ass.”

His pun went unappreciated. Odin clenched his jaw and Leo just clicked his tongue: a long and frustrated suck along the edges of the muscle, and that was how Niles knew how much trouble he was in. The longer, the worse—or better.

“Kill it,” Leo finally said. Odin's jaw worked again but he cast his eyes to the ground. “It would be a mercy, rather than leaving it here to starve.”

“You always have the answers, milord.”

Niles drew the knife from his belt. He could make the cut smooth and quick enough to be painless. It was the least he could do. The babe would have nothing but a life of misery, disadvantaged as she already was.

“Who are _you_ to be the hand of Fate?” Odin blurted. “Would you snatch away even the slightest chance of her survival?”

Leo sneered at him; the contempt, the sheer disgust at such naivete was more than enough of a scolding. Odin fell silent.

Niles put the tip of the knife to the child's chin. She tilted her head up with the motion as if he'd only nudged her with a knuckle, and trained her bright eyes on his face again.

For the first time in his career, Niles froze.

“Get on with it,” Leo snapped after a long moment. “They're leaving us behind.”

“Is it an order, milord?”

Odin looked up. Leo studied Niles, and then finally shifted his stance and folded his arms. Niles watched his expression with fascination. It flickered from stoic nonchalance to amusement to an unsettlingly keen reservation.

“No,” Leo said. “It's not.”

Niles turned his eye back to the baby. Her head bobbled as she tried to hold it up. The knife pricked the skin beneath her chin and she began to cry again. He watched a drop of blood slide down her throat.

He had been curious. He had been interested. He had been confused. But when he looked back to Leo, the so-familiar form of his lord and master, he realized that what he was most of all, more than anything, was _furious_.

Niles had laughed in the babe's face, but had he not pulled an arrow from a priest—perhaps the very man who might have taken her in? He looked at her, really looked, brown skin and pale hair and two seeing eyes, and the memories he'd worked so hard to drown began to rattle under his skin, surging bile up into his throat. After everything: after the starving and begging and gagging and slicing, after knowing the dry-heaving dread of being left for dead, could he do that to someone else? A grown man or woman, surely, an enemy spy or a pampered patron, and all those that lacked compassion. But her? What had she done to deserve it?

Leo's brown eyes held his for a long time. They were as probing and sharp as they'd been those years ago. Slowly, Niles lowered the knife.

He'd been worthless, back then. Nothing but a decoy—less than an animal, less than _anything_ living. He'd seen all the terrors of the world until there was nothing left to make him cry: not hunger or abandonment, not fire, not blood on his neck. He'd begged for death, for mercy, and cruel, beautiful Leo had denied him.

And if he had been granted life and purpose, he so stained and used, so disgusting, with so many sins...how could he not give the same to a faultless babe? Her only crime was being unwanted, and he knew what atrocities that led to. He'd had the dark noons in the alleyways. He'd felt Leo shake in the night, after Prince Xander finished fighting his stupid invisible evils in the courtyard below, after Princess Camilla slipped by his door to visit another sibling.

Should he not follow his dear lord's example? Was this not his debt to repay?

“Let's get going,” he said as he sheathed his knife and tucked the babe's head against his shoulder. Long strides took him down the church stairs and past the men watching him. The girl calmed at the rhythm. “You said we were already running late.”

“Niles!” Odin exclaimed, mercifully speechless beyond that. Leo sucked behind his teeth again.

“Of all the foolish, irresponsible—we're still in the middle of a war! How are you going to take _care_ of her?”

“I'll find a way,” Niles answered easily.

He always did.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huge thanks to Amielleon for betaing; this chapter would still be stuck in a muddy ditch otherwise.

It was harder than he thought. (For once, he didn't mean it crudely.)

First the babe needed a name. Odin had insisted at once (Of fucking course, Niles thought bitterly), but Niles also saw the uselessness in calling her nothing but “the girl.” He pondered the matter over that day's entire march.

He wanted better for her than something like his: Niles. Nil. Nothing. Zero. It suited him, a shameful name for a shameful man, but he thought maybe if he gave the babe a beautiful name, her life would be forced to suit that. For once he was glad for Odin's endless presence at his side. As they walked, the girl carried in a sling he'd fashioned from his mantle, they made a competition of listing the longest, fanciest, most high-brow names they could think of.

In the end Niles settled on _É_ _ponine_. To him it sounded both rare and elegant. Lord Leo told him, dryly, that it carried no meaning and came from a romance novel, but Niles liked the thought of that, too. The child was free to make her own meaning, that way.

Of course, rumors of his new ward spread like plague through the ranks, and everyone from Arthur to little princess Elise sought him out the moment the march stopped, hoping to peer into his sling and speak nonsense words at her. For Elise only, he bore it. For everyone else, he cupped Éponine's head in his hand like they were firing arrows and stalked away. It was too many people and too many smiles and too many questions they didn't deserve the answers to. And in the end, all it did was cut and hem the fancy edges of her name, since she was too small for it. By the time the moon rose, the entire camp was calling her Nina.

It was stupid to have indulged Elise, he decided, no matter how Leo doted on her.

\---

But finding the perfect name was nothing compared to the rest. Niles thought the night would go like any other, plus or minus an infant -- why wouldn’t it? But as soon as Odin lit a fire to share with him and Lord Leo, the very second Niles finished setting up Leo’s tent, before he could even touch the poles to his own, Nina began to wail, louder than ever before. No amount of bouncing or patting would shut her up.

“Surely she hungers,” Odin suggested from where he sat feeding the flames. Niles had found Nina mid-morning, the army had skipped lunch to put as much distance between them and the smoke of the burning town as possible, and they were still a long hour or two from dinner. He realized with a twinge of dread that babies didn’t follow schedules and didn’t shrug off their discomforts. This was an ultimatum: he could solve her hunger problem immediately, or put up with screaming until he had.

“What do you eat?” Niles asked her, but of course she couldn't reply. He stuck his finger into her screaming mouth to feel for teeth. Just two tiny ones on the bottom gum, not even fully grown-in. He cursed and then plopped her into Odin's lap.

“Milk would work, right?” he asked. “Milk from anything?”

The army needed to be fed, and they kept goats in the rear, since they could be herded faster and farther than cows. Odin nodded, stroking back Nina's feathery hair with a finger. She cried louder.

Niles hurried off and returned with a wooden bowl of goat's milk. Nina was flailing now, so hard that he almost spilled when he took her back from Odin. He tipped the bowl gently into her mouth but she didn't swallow, and that _did_ spill, all over her face and neck and chest.

“What's _wrong_ with you?” Niles demanded.

“Methinks she's too young to drink,” Odin said, light eyebrows creased. “Don't they only take from a bottle with a nipple?”

“Splendid,” Niles muttered through his teeth. “That'll be no problem to find _here_.”  

But maybe Nina would suckle from his fingers. Drop-by-drop would be tedious but he didn’t care anymore; all he wanted was for her to stop making her horrible noises. A quick rinse with water from his canteen cleared the dirt from his skin but made him keenly aware of the grit beneath his nails. He dipped his first two fingers into the bowl and tried to gather as much as he could.

Nina's eyes flew open the second she tasted milk. Her screams quieted to sobs between swallows, and then whimpers. It took an eternity to empty the bowl. She fell asleep soon after in the crook of his arm, and Niles thought he could collapse too.

“ _Thank_ you,” Lord Leo said from within his tent across the fire, at the sudden silence. “Some of us have strategies to develop.”

“Forgive me, my lord,” Niles called back, and used his sleeve to dry spilled milk from Nina's skin. He'd have to spend that long feeding her again, and soon, with how thin she was. He'd have to find her clothes somehow. He'd have to bathe her eventually. And now that she'd eaten, she was going to soil the diaper he'd messily fashioned out of a kitchen rag, and he was going to have to deal with that, too.

Leo emerged from the tent, quill in hand, though he didn't look as angry as his voice had sounded. If anything, Niles was so bold as to think, he looked curious. He stalked around the fire with measured steps and then bent over to study Nina, hands behind his back. She stirred in her sleep to nuzzle into Niles's shirt, as if trying to bury herself in him, and at that a warmth leaked through his chest and made him frown.

“So you really are going to keep her alive,” Leo said, almost as if asking a question.

“You said killing her wasn’t an order.”

“No. I wanted to see how you would respond.”

“I hope milord is satisfied.”

“We’ll see.”

Leo didn’t move to sit beside Niles, but he didn’t stop hovering, either. After a moment his presence felt as heavy as Nina’s actual weight, almost like he’d leaned his chin on Niles’s shoulder. Odin edged closer to peer into Nina’s sleeping face. Niles glanced up to see if Leo was doing the same, if his look was fierce or scrutinizing or even the rare gentleness he showed to his little sister, but it was undecipherable under his long lashes.

“You really have gotten yourself into a deal of trouble,” Leo said finally.

Niles made a low noise of agreement. “But what else is new?”

\---

After plenty of milk to give her some strength (at the cost of a sleepless night for Niles), Nina began to do strange things. Niles wasn’t sure if she was particularly weird or if it was something common to all babies, but he decided on the latter as they marched and he lost his fourth consecutive staring contest with her. Babies were hardly even real people; they were small and new and knew nothing about the world. So Nina didn’t know any better than to brace her hands on his chest, hold her wobbly neck up, and gaze and gaze and gaze.

“Not a pretty sight,” he told her once, but she hardly even blinked. When she got drowsy, she even started reaching up to touch his cheeks: curious strokes and then clumsy pats, as if to see what he was made of, as if beneath flesh and molars she'd find something more substantial. He snapped his teeth at her but she wasn't phased by that, either, and just started pushing his lips open with her fingers to see if he'd do it again.

 _Thank the gods for Odin._ It was something Niles never believed he’d think, but he _did_ think it when the march stopped for the night and he handed Nina off to him. Odin took her without a question or even a noise of protest, and Niles went off into the treeline to piss before they set up camp, figuring Nina didn't need to smell any more than necessary. He still had to change her out of her own piss, and soon, judging by how she’d been fussing. But the moment alone gave him time to think.

He’d kept an infant alive for an entire day. That meant he could keep doing it. But days piled up into weeks and months, and this war against Hoshido had been raging in one form or another for generations. Could he keep Nina alive for weeks and then months?

Could he do it for years?

And then what? What if one day the war ended? Niles suddenly felt dizzy, and tried to blame it on dehydration as he re-buttoned his trousers. It made keeping his balance on the walk back into camp difficult. Nina had been watching him all day. If she kept that up, what was she going to see? What was she going to learn? He had skills to pass on, all right: pocket-picking, kidney-stabbing, taking all manner of things in the mouth without retching or up the ass without crying. He couldn't quite remember how he knew, but he knew so _well_. He bit the inside of his cheek until he tasted blood.

Maybe he could send her off to study something once she was old enough. Politics or tactics or hell, even music. Magic, like Lord Leo. His salary was enough to provide for her, if he apprenticed her to someone.

But who would take in a young lady who'd spent her life on the road, hardly better than a street urchin? She wouldn’t be clean. She'd have no manners. How could Niles get her those? Could he teach her how to read? How to count? How to do _anything at all_ besides lie down for the people stronger than her and hope for the best?

A pleading voice broke him out of his thoughts when he reached the little circle where he, Odin, and Leo would sleep. Odin bounced Nina in his arms by his still-collapsed tent and a barely-lit twig fire, his supplications doing about as much for her mood as his poorly-timed dramatics did for anyone’s. When Niles was close enough to grab her, Nina twisted to be free, sobbing and holding her arms out to him.

He didn't think about it. It just made taking her from Odin easier. It'd be nice if she did it more often, really, instead of wriggling. But Odin stared as Nina quieted in his grasp and snuggled into his shoulder, and finally managed,

“By the Darkness of this Mighty Hand: I'll be damnéd.”

Niles kicked the canvas pile of Odin's tent before stalking to his own. He had no other retort. He had to feed Nina well and get her soundly asleep somehow, because he wasn’t pulling another all-nighter if he could help it.

\---

He pulled three. Four. Five. Nina woke every _two hours_ to cry, and in between soothing her back to sleep with rubs, scrambling off in the dark for more goat milk, or changing her diaper with the pile of mostly-clean cloth scraps he'd collected, Niles laid stiffly awake, terrified that he'd roll over and crush her in the cot they had no choice but to share.

His days were fogged by exhaustion and a vague, far-off sense of hysteria. He could deal with drool and vomit and urine and shit; it was nothing he hadn't dealt with before (and in some cases, better than). What he was not used to was stumbling on the march, dozing off during watch when that could get them all killed, and the endless onslaught of army members trying to check on the baby. He said some awful things to them in reflex: called Charlotte a whore and propositioned her until she stormed off swearing revenge, threatened to castrate Arthur and glue his cock to his massive chin so he looked like the puff-chested rooster he was. He couldn't even remember what he said to Laslow, only that it made Xander corner Lord Leo after mess one night and warn him that if he didn't train his dog, the dog might just be choked to death.

But he was doing the right thing by chasing them away, he knew. People who could be trusted were rare and precious, and he was going to keep Nina well away from everyone else. She was already suffering enough.

Life on the road was no life for a baby. If she peed, Niles couldn't very well leave the ranks to bathe and change her and get them both left behind, so she had to sit in her own filth and cry while he covered her mouth with his hand to muffle her, and then she got rashes from it that he had no lotion for. She napped when she could, in her makeshift sling, but if an officer shouted a command or the infantry started up their damned chanting and shield-banging for morale, she would wake. She had dark circles under her big eyes and her spine rose razor-sharp. Her lower teeth were still coming in, and though Odin told him chewing on ice-chilled cloth could stop her fussing, they had no ice and nothing clean enough to put in her mouth.

Eventually he whittled a stick of supple wood smooth and gave her that, neglecting his own supper to get the work done and then feed her. She gnawed it like a puppy and got her drool everywhere, but seemed to appreciate the gift.

“What am I doing?” he asked her that night in the darkness, when they were bundled in his cot. She just looked up at him and kept chewing. Something like bile rose in his throat. He swallowed it back.

\---

It took ten days for him to break.

Nina wouldn't sleep that night no matter what he did. He heard Odin tossing and turning through the canvas walls, and snatched her up with a curse when he thought of Lord Leo. His eyes burned with exhaustion as he marched away as fast as he could; even the dim moonlight stung them. Nina's voice was driving him _insane_ – the same instinct that raised his hackles around strangers, that made him flinch away from buzzing before horseflies bit, it _demanded_ he stop the crying. He'd gone without sleep before, and without food, and without peace of mind while he watched Lord Leo from the dark corner of his chamber after rumours of assassinations, but all that hadn’t made his inner ears ache and his chest tighten like his ribs were being crunched beneath a boot. And he’d only felt too exhausted to keep fighting once before.

He made for the treeline with her, past the privy trenches, into the scrub brush, stumbling over roots, short of breath. When he thought they'd gotten far enough away, at least far enough that the moonlight stopped assaulting all his senses, he dropped to his knees with a rasp of dead leaves.

“What do you want?” he demanded. “I fed you! I changed you! Why won't you sleep?”

She was crying so hard now that her voice was raw. The scream petered out, too big for her lungs, a hysterical hiss of air, and she gulped a huge breath while Niles shook, shook himself, shook her.

“Shut up!” he screamed into her face, and she screamed right back.

His hands tightened around her ribs. He could squeeze until her cries cut off, he could shake her so hard he snapped her neck. It's what he should have done from the first, instead of playing House out of some misguided pity. He should kill her now, or at least leave her by the roadside to be someone _else's_ problem, because he didn't owe her anything, because this was _way_ more trouble than it was worth, because he was a shitty person who would make a shitty father and couldn't give her anything but a shitty life.

With a shaky sigh, he loosened his grasp. At the sudden ease her crying turned watery and she reached for him, tentative. He pulled her to his chest and held her close.

“Nina, I'm sorry.” The words brushed over her head. “I didn't save you from anything. I was foolish to assume otherwise.”  

She continued to cry, but there was nothing he could do, save rub her back until she'd exhausted herself. Even long after she'd grown heavy on his shoulder – though not asleep, for she still whimpered now and again – he couldn't manage more than kneeling there and breathing and following the patterns of roots and their shadows with his eyes.

None of this was her fault. It was his.

He buried his nose in her hair, more disgusted with himself than he could remember being in a long time. She smelled like spit-up and sour milk and _Nina_ , a sweet infant smell he almost would've liked to be smothered in. He pressed his mouth to her round cheek and exhaled out all his frustration. It made a silly, flatulent sound against her skin and they both froze, startled into silence.

For the first time, Nina cooed.

“So you like that noise?” Niles asked, and after a pause, dipped his head to make it again on the side of her neck. This time she giggled. “Oh yeah?”

He went back to her cheek and did it again. It was more difficult now that he was smiling too.

“Does it tickle? Does it tickle _a lot?_ ”

She was shrieking with laughter by the time a crisp “Niles,” cut the night air. His back stiffened. Good thing he was already on his knees.

“Forgive me, my lord. I tried to leave before we woke you.”

He wondered if Leo would punish him. He wondered if Leo would at least take him away from Nina first. He didn’t want her to see. But Leo’s voice was easy as he answered,

“I was awake regardless.”

Niles caught the flash of Leo's pale, ungloved hand as he waved it, brushing the apology away, approaching through stripes of moonlight through the branches. Despite his gait, his face was taut.

“Too much on your mind to sleep, my lord?”

“Something feels uneasy.”

“Is that so?” Niles rose with Nina, glancing over his shoulder.

“The night watch hasn't called anything. It's probably...old habit.”

“Your instincts are a weapon now, my lord,” Niles reassured him, but now he was on the alert too. Something _was_ off. Though Nina had stopped crying, the forest was silent. Nothing stirred, nothing scampered.

A cry rang from the rear.

Leo and Niles ran for it at once, Niles tucking Nina into her sling and reaching back for a quiver that wasn't there. The soldiers' yelling was drowned in foreign shouts and then inhuman screams. Niles leapt over the trenches and swung himself into a supply caravan: weapons. He strung the first bow his hands found in the darkness but couldn’t draw it back with a baby against his chest; someone pulled her free and Odin's voice -- “Let fly, Niles!” -- was all that kept him from putting his first arrow through the snatcher’s eye. He nocked and took a breath. Odin called lightning down with a sizzle that rolled over his skin. In its after-flash Niles feathered one, two, three Hoshidan ninja – and the rest were gone, fled into the black forest.

The raid finished as soon as it had begun.

Nina's wispy hair stood on end with static when Odin handed her back to Niles and went off to check on the men he'd shot down. Leo was not far off, jaw clenched, snapping Brynhildr shut as a soldier ran to his side:

“My lord, they've slaughtered all the horses they could reach, and set free all the rest!”

“Never mind that!” said another man. “They got into the convoy! There's no dried meat left!”

“And the goats?” Leo demanded. Both soldiers paused, unable to answer. Leo sucked behind his teeth and pushed past them, farther behind the convoy, to the herd. Niles leapt out of the wagon, bow still in his free hand, and hurried at his heels.

The goats, with typical Hoshidan thoroughness, had not been forgotten. One dragged itself about, confused by the commotion and the darkness, bleating softer and softer as its wounds poured out. The other two dozen lay already sprawled, throats more cleanly slit, blood still slick and gleaming in the moonlight.

Leo and Niles were silent, just watching the last goat die. Nina began to cry again.


End file.
